The Killing Type (17 page)

“Turned,” I say.

“Yeah, man,
turned
,” she says and
laughs. “Seriously, though, my opinion—my
theory
—in case you want to give up
writing and start sleuthing—my opinion is that it’s just some
otherwise reputable citizen. Talk about your clichés, I guess.” She
laughs again, but more lightly and uncomfortably now.

I realize that I’m doomed, that she is
either perfectly innocent, or so deviously guilty that my charms
and wiles will wither fecklessly at her feet. The rest of the meal
is somewhat of an effort, on my part certainly and as far as I can
discern, on Tony’s part as well. Not sure why, really: I suppose
that we had reached our climax, and there could be nothing but bad
thereafter.

I walk home afterwards, trying to
savour and salvage the evening. Just as I am about to enter, I hear
my name called from the street and I am genuinely startled:
logically I realize that a killer is unlikely to call out to a
victim before the deed, but of course I am not thinking quite
straight. I turn around and am relieved to see a police car, its
officer now heading towards me.

“Hello, I’m Officer Carp. Not sure if
you remember me, but I’m wondering if you’d have a few minutes to
talk about that email. I know the timing’s probably bad, but I
happened to be patrolling the neighbourhood, and I thought I’d give
it a shot. Seeing you, that is.”

“Sure. Did you want to come
inside?”

“That would be best, yes, if that’s
all right with you.”

He declines my offer of something to
drink, and gets right down to business once he sits
down.

“I just wanted to ask you a few
questions about that email. Now, you said that that was the one and
only email you received, is that right?”

I conclude, wisely or not, that it’s
best to continue with the lie: “Yes.”

“Have you received any other kind of
communication—say, a letter or a package or anything like
that—anything else apparently from the same person and with the
same, the same tone?”

“No, I haven’t.” Ah, glorious
truth.

“Can you think of any reason why
anyone would be sending you a message like this? Why would anyone
care whether you finished your book or not?”

“Well, of course, I am not fully
certain, but I think it’s a safe speculation that in spite of the
bravado in the email—you know, the taunting me and all of that—in
spite of that I suspect that the killer just wants to scare off any
attention being paid to the murders. And perhaps it’s less of a
risk to send an email to a single person like me, a writer and an
amateur investigator, than to send it to the police directly. Does
that make sense?”

“Yes, I think I see what you mean.” He
writes something down on a pad of paper, crosses out a word, and
then writes something else. When he looks up he has a quizzical
shimmer in his eyes, and I am worried that this interrogation, if I
can call it that, will go on either because he doesn’t believe me
or because there is something in this simple fact that he is not
able to fathom.

“Well, I think that’s all for now,”
Officer Carp says, and I hope that my sigh isn’t as audible as it
seems. “One thing I would like to remind you, though, and perhaps
this goes without saying: please let us know if you receive any
other email or any other form of communication from this person.
It’s very important. I will tell you right now that we have few
leads, and we have to follow up on everything no matter how remote
it might be.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry to disturb your evening,” he
says as he gets up from the chair.

“Not at all.”

I close the door gently behind him and
I watch out the window as he gets into his car. He removes
something from the glove compartment and sets it on the passenger
seat in the front. The car starts and he pulls away
slowly.

I sit down in the living room with all
the lights off now, and I feel unaccountably nervous or angry or
depressed or some other emotion I can’t quite identify. There’s a
swirl of thoughts in my head, some of Tony, some of Officer Carp:
they meld, separate, and then meld again in odd ways. I see him
going to visit her, and then her dressed in a police uniform coming
to interrogate the two of us. Nothing is at it should be. It
requires all of my self-control and rationality to dampen my anger,
and I manage to convince myself that he is just doing his job, for
which I should be grateful, and that his lamentably ineffectual
questions were not meant to imply that I had done anything wrong or
that the police are in any way dissatisfied with my actions. I
wonder for a moment whether they might resent the book in some way
(amateur getting to the bottom of things while they languish). As
for Tony, she remains an enigma to be, tantalizing, and I make a
silent vow that I will find out the truth about her.

Chapter 18

Someone somewhere at some time has
touted the value of travel as a source of not only relief from the
daily hardships and stresses of one’s regular life, but also
rejuvenation, revitalization, something to make one come alive
again outside of this dead and dying town. I feel engulfed in
failure and danger and frustration—in fact, quite a range of
negativities every day which no amount of walking along the lake or
ensconcement in the library can really ease very much. I meet
people randomly on the street now, especially Tony and the raver,
and I never know what to say, whether to snub them and walk by
while they stare slack-jawedly into my back and perhaps even mouth
my name incredulously, whether to come right out and tell them not
to bother me any more—or, sometimes, in moments of either lucidity
or dementia, embracing them literally and figuratively, welcoming
humans into my world as a method of assuagement instead of
attempting to leave it all.

But, a trip. A trip. I scour the map
on my wall and immediately alight on Victoria, the appeal of the
island, of distance, of mountains and more temperate weather.
Before I am about to click the final button online for the
reservations, I think about my meagre budget, the inadvisability of
spending five hundred dollars when I have so little money and so
few prospects of earning any more. I have my index finger poised a
full ten seconds, fifteen, half a minute above the mouse and oh
what a pitter-pat it is when I finally click and the system churns
for what seems like hours before finally telling me that all is
set. Tension, increased tension, and then release and relief of a
sort. It seems like an auspicious beginning somehow for my six days
out west.

(The attentive reader will
have noticed that I have more or less abandoned the economical
manner of living on which I expounded so self-righteously earlier.
The reason has been partly necessity, and partly a developing
reluctance to subject myself to privations when I am in the midst
of a murder investigation. A quibbler, such as I used to be in my
own full-fledged academic days, might look askance at my use of
“necessity” here. A trip is
necessary
? Of course it isn’t but all
I am trying to say is that I have half decided and half just fallen
into the habit of living a relatively regular life, with meals out
and new clothing and, yes, the occasional trip. Another
necessity-related factor—where on
earth
did I learn to write like
this!—I might cite is my recent decision/calculation that I may not
need to survive for a whole two years in this quiet little burgh
after all, and so even though I have no plans to start spending
wildly, yet I can land myself somewhere between normalcy and
indulgence.)

I notice myself tending toward
vagueness and unconcern as we sit on the tarmac at Pearson in
Toronto, waiting for the plane to go through its final checks
before taking off for Victoria. The make and model of the plane,
the time difference between the two cities, the duration of the
flight—nothing occurs to me and nothing seems to matter very much.
I am not sure whether this is a good or a bad sign.

“Insert the flat metal fitting into
the buckle,” she is saying at the front of the plane, holding the
whole apparatus aloft and making me wonder for a brief moment
whether it should go around my head instead of my hips. And what
exactly is a “fitting” anyway? She blathers on, it goes to a French
recording, the captain says something authoritative, and we are
soon in the air—and I feel myself whisking away from everything on
my mind.

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve
flown anywhere, and as I settle back in my seat with my feet
stretched out and my arms finding a comfortable home on the
armrests, I think about the many times I flew around the continent
for conferences and meetings when I was at TU. The reminiscence
brings a twinge of sadness for the missed variety and the stunting
of my academic development, and so I literally shake the thought
out of my head and sink even further back for a nap. My current
line of what one might call work assails me while I am out, and I
dream of knives and guns and wounds of all shapes and descriptions,
women lying around on blood-soaked carpets and men being pulled
from the lake.

I awake with a start and I am not sure
whether the moaning scream I heard was part of the dream or not. I
turn my head tentatively toward the man next to me. He smiles and
says, “You were having a good one,” and I can only furrow my brow
awkwardly in response and turn back to something more pleasant than
murderous terror.

I’ve come prepared, bringing
along an odd little collection called
10 by
10
, that is, ten short stories by ten “up
and coming exciting new writers who’ll shock your socks off,” as
the blurb shouts it a little desperately. Even more interesting,
especially when the pleasures of flight begin to wane, is a
promising-looking new book on the history of the QWERTY keyboard,
from its first use in typewriters over a hundred years ago to its
continued dominance in the 21st century. I’ve read this book’s
blurbs with a slight twinge of nostalgic regret, of course, as the
topic reminds me of my own aborted research and the curtailment of
personal development which I so unfairly endured.

The man next to me says something and
I hesitate to look over at him again for fear that he was talking
to me.

“Pardon?”

“Business or pleasure? Why ya headed
to Victoria?”

I did not and do not want to get into
any of this, and I consider making up some bogus story as I’ve had
to do several times with the raver. My hearing is bad. My English
is not so good (“ya understand?”). I seem to have been dropped here
through the portal of some other dimension and I have absolutely no
idea what the hell you are talking about or what this clackety
metal machine is doing here ten kilometres above the ground
and—

“Pleasure,” I manage. “Just taking a
little time off.”

“Hey, me too. Work can get to you, am
I right? Right? Anyways, off to visit my ...” and on he goes and I
stop paying attention, instead devoting all my energy to seeming
like I am paying attention. It is an effort.

“And what do you plan to do
when you are in the city?” I hear him saying, and at that point, no
alternative seat possible on this full flight, no means of escape,
I contrive an illness (“doctors say I should limit talking to an
absolute minimum”), and my last raspy half-sentence to him is an
apology. He says he understands and for a brief moment I worry that
he’s interpreted my situation as permission for
him
to do all the talking—but, no,
thankfully, he returns to a magazine and after I watch him flip to
an article about back pain or foie gras or the imminent Rapture or
whatever it is, I sink a little lower in my seat, rest my head near
the window, and start to watch the world go by.

Victoria is one of those cities in
which I’ve never felt comfortable. Nothing to do with danger, just
that it feels like an undecided, unsettled city, and it leaves me a
little unsettled as well. It’s a movie set in one part of town, the
ocean in another part; quaint side streets with ethnic restaurants
here, and deserted post-apocalyptic industrial burbs over there.
Every time I go there I always feel compelled to drive somewhere
else, head up the island to Tofino or make the crossing to
Vancouver.

I am outside a Thai restaurant called
Thia and my eyebrows go halfway up at the crude and obvious typo
before I realize that it’s intentional, a cachet by way of bad
orthography. The place is well lit and charmingly decorated with a
combination of Western and Asian (Asain?) pieces. I am already
seated at a window table when Leonard walks up to me. I stand up
and am unfortunately too distracted by the napkin that falls from
my lap onto the floor to devote much effort to the hug.

“Listen, Andrew,” he says, “I have a
favour to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“I’m a little tired of eating out
these days, and I wonder whether you wouldn’t mind just coming over
to my place. We could grab a cab and be there in ten minutes. You
haven’t ordered yet, have you?”

“No, I haven’t, and sure, that sounds
fine.”

I tell the waiter that we are leaving
after all, and I have to resort to a lie about an emergency (“she’s
barely breathing”) to bring it all home.